September Highlights
Over the past month I have collated a selection of useful articles and resources relating to web design and search engine optimisation. If you have any highlights from the past month feel free to leave a comment below.
Useful Articles & Resources
Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation: Making a Choice
I’m a big believer in building accessible websites, but where do you draw the line? Browser anomalies still abound in 2009, what sacrifices and necessities do you make in your web designs?
List of Great Firefox Plugins for SEO
A great selection of plugins that make your job as an SEO much quicker. I personally don’t use all of the plugins mentioned in the article, but I can vouch for Search Status, Firebug and Web Developer. Some of the other plugins have options that can be accessed within these three plugins so it’s worth having a good browse around the plugin menus to see what capabilities they have. This will avoid unnecessary plugin installation and subsequent Firefox bloat.
Search Engine Optimisation 101
This is quite a nice guide for those who are new to search engine optimisation. However, I would always recommend doing your own testing and researching from several reputable sources.
101 Website Fixes
An exhaustive list of resources and articles to improve every aspect of your website. This is definitely an article that I will be bookmarking and referring to. The article gives a list of resources that cover the following aspects:
- Copywriting
- Usability
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Accessibility
- Design
- Legal
10 Useful Usability Findings & Guidelines
Useful guidelines from various usability studies that look at where people click on the page, best practice for form design, use of whitespace and the ideal internal search box structure.
jQuery Tools
Noupe has a nice round-up of jQuery Tools. A simple jQuery framework that has a small footprint. The jQuery Tools collection weighs-in at just over 5.5 KB’s making it an ideal script to include on your pages for some nice presentational enhancements. For many web designers jQuery Tools may be all you need to achieve some excellent aesthetic site improvements. Choose which jQuery elements you need for your design whilst avoiding unnecessary code that you don’t need.
Introduction to HTML 5
One of the hottest topics in web design/development is HTML 5. Brad Neuberg gives an excellent Introduction to HTML 5. Brad covers some of the most exciting and interesting elements such as Canvas and SVG and Video in HTML 5.
Google Chrome Frame
Render IE as Google Chrome with Google Chrome Frame. This IE plugin lets developers bring HTML 5 capabilities to Internet Explorer. The plugin is triggered by a meta tag within the page head, and there is a JS script to force the plugin to install on IE. I would assume the forced install will be disabled as standard in many network environments unfortunately.
